With the rapid increase in usage of the Internet in recent times, people are turning to computers for answers to everyday questions in the form of natural language with ever increasing regularity. Artificial or machine intelligence has been under development for many years, but is now gaining attention from the general public as Web sites such as Askjeeves.com allow users to input questions to obtain desired information. Another such example is SynTactic Analysis using Reversible Transformations (“START”), that was developed at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Connected to the World Wide Web since December, 1993, START is a software system designed to answer questions that are posed to it in natural language. START uses a special form of annotations to perform text retrieval. An example of such annotations to perform text retrieval is provided in U.S. Pat. No. 5,309,359 to Katz et al. Another similar system is CYCORP'S “CYC” system. CYC provides the capability for answering natural language questions using its proprietary knowledge base. While CYC uses an agent-based architecture, the intelligent agents are of the same type, working in parallel to cover different “knowledge” space.
However, no artificial or computer intelligence systems presently available utilize individual components, each with a dedicated function, that collaborate with one another to help interpret a user's input and construct a response. Conventional systems presently available likewise do not parse a user's input in a conceptual manner. In addition, conventional systems presently available do not include characteristics specific to the individual asking the question when interpreting the question and constructing a response to the question.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide an artificial intelligence system that utilizes components that are dedicated to specific tasks and collaborate with one another to help interpret a user's input and to generate responses to the user's input. It likewise would be desirable to provide an artificial intelligence system that parses input in a conceptual, rather than grammatical, manner. Additionally, it would be desirable to provide an artificial intelligence system that utilizes characteristics specific to the individual user when generating responses to the user's input.